Recycling Made Easy – And Outrageously Expensive

posted in: October 1990 | 0

If your heart says Caddy but your budget says Kimo’s Kream Puffs, you probably won’t waste a lot of time with your ose pressed to the glass of a Cadillac dealer’s showroom. You certainly won’t spend a year driving the Caddy and making payments on it only to decide when the year is over that, because you cannot afford that car, you cannot afford any car.

In similar fashion, if you’re looking for a cost-effective approach to recycling, you might think long and hard before test-driving a curbside pickup program – the “Cadillac” of recycling approaches.

Yet this is what the Division of Refuse has done in its first effort to implement City Ordnace No. 89-115, which calls for the establishment of a recycling pilot program “to test the feasiblitiy and cost-effectivents of recycling.”

Although nothing in the ordinance excludes selection of a curbside pickup recycling system, nothing requires it, either. Experiences on the Mainland have already shown that curbside recycling is the most expensive way to salvage recyclables from refuse, with collection costs about $120 a ton. Community drop-off and collection centers, on the other hand, at roughly $30 a ton, are cheaper even than regular curbside collection of unsorted trash (in Honolulu, about $70 a ton). (Those numbers were provided by Frank Doyle, Director of the Division of Refuse Collection and Disposal in the City’s Department of Public Works.)

Environment Hawai`i has tried to calculate the cost of Honolulu’s curbside program. We estimate that collection costs will range from about $214 per ton of recycled goods to $356 a ton or even higher, if participation slacks off. When allowance is made for avoided costs and sale of recycled material, the net costs may fall as low as a respectable $86 a ton (Assuming maximum participation, and no fall in market prices for recycled commodities). A more likely forecast would be at least $200 a ton, and probably higher.

Here is how the program works: Households in several Windward communities have been given either a bag system (A frame plus two reusable bags, one for plastic – milk jugs and soda bottles only – and newspaper, the other for glass and aluminum cans) or a bin system (three stackable plastic bins, one for glass, one for newspaper, and the third for aluminum cans plus thte plastic milk jugs and soda bottles). People are asked to set the bins or bags out on a given weekday; a private contractor (Waste Management of Hawai`i) then comes around and picks up what has been set out. For the bag system, the bags are piled onto the collection truck, to be emptied and sorted later. For the bin system, the recyclables are tossed into one of six appropriate bins on the collection truck. The contractor then drops the goods off at a transfer station, where they are hauled away by recyclers.

There are about 8,200 households in the recycling project. Thirty-two hundred have received bags; the remainder binds. For each household that received a bag system, the contractor is paid 43 cents a week (term of the contract is 48 weeks). For each household that received a set of bins, the comtractor is paid $1.48 a week (again, for 48 weeks). For each week, then, the City pays $8,776 for curbside pickup of recyclables, or about $421,000 for the 48 weeks of the contract.

According to Suzanne Jones, the City’s recycling coordinator, the average household generates about 500 pounds of recyclable materials a year (somewhat less than 10 pounds per week). If every one of the 8,200 households in the recycling program set out 10 pounds each week, the total amount of recyclables that the program can optimally be expected to generate over its 48-week duration is 1,968 tons – for an unadjusted collection cost of $213.92 per ton.

Recycling programs on the Mainland typically see participation rates of 60 to 70 percent. If Honolulu experiences that, then the per-ton collection cost – still assuming 10 pounds per household each week – will rise to between $305.29 a ton (70 percent participation) and $356.18 a ton (60 percent).

Offsetting those figures are the following considerations: The City avoids having to pay the $54 a ton tipping fee it would have to pay if the recyclables were taken to H-POWER. And it would be paying $70 a ton anyway for hauling any refuse. The City thus avoids spending $124 for each ton of goods recycled in the pilot program. (This is not quite accurate, but to give the benefit of a doubt to the recycling program, we have calculated it in this fashion. Because of fixed costs and labor, unless there is a long-term and permanent reduction in the amount of refuse taken out of the waste stream, the City does not realize 100 percent of the avoided costs. In the short term, in fact – such as the duration of the pilot program – the avoided costs are negligible.)

Additionally, the City is paid by Reynolds Aluminum Recycling Co. and Hawai’i Environmental Transfer for some of the recyclables. For the sorted aluminum (from the bin system), Reynolds pays 40 cents a pound. Hawai’i Environmental Transfer picks up everything at the following rates:

For glass: sorted in three colors (From the bin system), 2 cents a pound; unsorted (bag system), half-a-cent a pound;

For aluminum from the bag system: 15 cents a pound;

For plastic: from the bin system, .25 cent (a quarter cent) a pound; from the bag system, minus 2 cents a pound;

In obtaining bids, the City anticipated that twice as many households would be using bags as bins – roughly the opposite of what occurred. It also projected income based on 52 weeks rather than 48. Environment Hawai`i has adjusted the City’s income projections accordingly (reversing the figures for bin and bag systems, and reducing them all by a factor of 81 percent first to account for the shorter duration of the program, and hten to bring the projected collection tonnages in line with the general figure of 10 pounds per household per week, or 1,970 tons for 11 months.) (The unadjusted income projections were reviewed in the office of the City’s Division of Refuse.)

The bottom line is elastic, but a range of values can be obtained nonetheless. THe best-case scenario woul dyield about 1,970 tons of recyclabls. Fixed collection costs are $421,000. Income from sale of recyclables would be about $6,759. And avoided costs (generously figured at 100 percent) would amount ot $244,280. Final net cost per collected ton woul dbe about $86, comparing favorably with Mainland experience.

A more likely scenario, but still optimistic, is that 70 percent of thehouseholds will participate, with many of them pulling out their aluminum for private recycling. Cost of collection would still be $421,000. Income from recyclables would drop to zero. Avoided costs of collecting roughly 1,380 tons would be about $171,000. Net cost per ton would be $181.29.

A third scenario (but no means a worst case) would see the City collecting about 1,100 tons – or 100 tons a month. Considering that, according to Hawai`i Environmental Transfer, the program generated just 120 tons in the first month, when people put out recyclables they have been stashing for weeks, it is not far-fetched to estimate collection at 100 tons per average month. Should this happen, the City would probably end up paying recyclers to haul goods away. The calculation of avoided costs would also fall (to $136,400). Net collection costs (assuming no loss on sales of recyclables): $258.72 a ton.

Recycling should not be expected to pay for itself, especially so long as disposal systems remain heavily subsidized. Still, if the City’s curbside project is to be used as a test of recyling’s cost-effectiveness, we predict that next July, the only possible verdict will be that curbside recycling is impossibly expensive.

Fortunately, the City is also sponsoring recycling drop-off centers at 20 schools across O`ahu. If Honolulu is to have any hope of a municipally sponsored recycling program, it surely lies more in the direction of a drop-off center than a curbside bin.

Volume 1, Number 4 October 1990